During Congress’ lame-duck session, some members are expected to try to reinstate and even permanently extend the “bonus depreciation” tax break as part of legislation continuing various “tax extenders” (a package of primarily corporate tax provisions that policymakers routinely extend). Bonus …

The Child Tax Credit (CTC) legislation that the House is slated to consider this week has misguided priorities: it would make many relatively affluent families better off while letting millions of low-income working families become poorer.
The bill permanently alters the CTC by extending it higher up the income scale so …

House and Senate appropriators have begun considering the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) budget, which is part of the Financial Services and General Government appropriations bill. While much attention will likely focus on certain policy issues, such as the IRS’s examination of tax-exempt organizations and its role in …

Some policymakers are promoting another “repatriation tax holiday” to encourage multinational corporations to bring overseas profits back to the United States by offering them a temporary, very low tax rate on those profits. In particular, some have described a repatriation holiday as a “win-win” that …

Federal taxes on middle-income Americans are near historic lows,[1] according to the latest available data. That’s true both for federal income taxes and total federal taxes.[2]
Income taxes: A family of four in the exact middle of the income spectrum filing its taxes for 2013 this filing season paid only 5.3 percent of its 2013 income in …

The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which went to 27.9 million low- and moderate-income working families in 2011, provides work, income, educational, and health benefits to its recipients and their children, a substantial body of research shows. In addition, recent ground-breaking research suggests, the EITC’s …

Policymakers have taken important steps in recent decades to prevent the federal tax code from taxing people into or deeper into poverty. This bipartisan effort has helped shape various features of the tax code including the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), a tax credit for low- and moderate-income working people. In …

The Tax Foundation released its annual “Tax Freedom Day” report today that, once again, can leave a strikingly misleading impression of tax burdens — showing an average federal tax rate across the United States that’s likely higher than the tax rate that 80 percent of U.S. households actually pay.
To project the day when “the …

Both the debate over the minimum wage and the recent 50th anniversary of President Johnson’s War on Poverty have focused more attention on the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) for low- and moderate-income workers, which has been shown to increase work, reduce poverty, and lower welfare receipt.[1] In addition, some …

The President’s proposal to raise the federal excise tax on tobacco products and use the additional revenue to expand preschool education, which he included in both his fiscal year 2014 and 2015 budgets, could achieve the dual goals of reducing the number of premature deaths due to smoking and raising an estimated $78 …

While liberals and conservatives differ sharply in assessing the War on Poverty,[1] they seem to agree that we must do more to help low-income childless workers to succeed in the workplace — most likely by strengthening the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which currently does little for this group.
A number of …

A key goal of tax reform should be to generate new revenue as part of a balanced deficit-reduction package that replaces sequestration and reduces long-term deficits.[2] Revenue savings can come from paring back costly and inefficient tax deductions, exclusions, and other tax breaks, known collectively as “tax …